Comment by gwd
7 years ago
If everyone in the world becomes vegan, what exactly do you think is going to happen to all of those domesticated cows, sheep, and chickens? Are people going to continue raising them as pets in the same quantities, out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not -- they would basically go extinct.
I think that on the whole, I think that having a reasonably comfortable and safe life and then being humanely slaughtered for food is better than not existing at all. So while I'm definitely ethically against "industrial" meat production that treats live animals like meat-generating machines, I think that raising animals in reasonable living conditions before killing them to eat is perfectly ethical.
(Whether we have the resources to raise them is a different question; I'm resigned to the fact that eventually we'll all be on plant-based diets for planet sustainability reasons.)
FYI, some land is well suited to grow food crops, other land isn't. The share varies by region, of course. There's a limit to how much meat we can eat if we are to use the land optimally. That limit isn't zero.
The limit surely isn't anywhere near having meat in every single meal, including bacon in milkshakes.
Well, most people on the planet don't eat meat in every single meal.
I've commented on this before, but I'm Greek and our traditional cuisine has many dishes that are naturally vegan, in the sense that no meat or animal products are used in them, but nobody actually calls them, or thinks of them as vegan, only as "normal food". There's a list here, compiled by a vegan very happy to have visited Greece:
https://www.thenomadicvegan.com/the-nomadic-vegans-guide-to-...
I believe this is a common situation in many parts of the world. I thik most people eat meat only according to their needs. Especially earlier in human history, before industrial farming, meat would have been an expensive luxury for most people, who would have complemented their diet with fish, dairy and eggs, being naturally lacto- ovo- pescaterian rather than vegan, and would have eaten meat (especially beef) on special occasions like feasts and weddings and so on.
So maybe veganism is a reaction to the particular eating habbits of specific parts of the world, where meat is eaten too frequently?
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It depends a lot on the particular climate and soil. In a lot of places, the best you can do with the land is grazing. The soil is good enough only for raising pasture, and as we don't diggest cellulose, cattle serve as some kind of reactor to transform unedible cellulose into food.
In other places, like mountainous ranges, it would be pretty hard to get some sustenance directly from the ground, but again, goats are useful factories that turn otherwise unedible brush into food.
Most of the problem occurs because government subsidies make economical to raise cattle in places that should have no business doing so because there is plenty of better-suited environment in the third-world to free-range cattle.
Feeding grains to cattle in a high-wage first world country under confinement is way more expensive than buying meat for third-world countries in Africa or Latin American, and it only happens because of the lobbying power of farmers and agro-corporations.
Quite right.
I've read a serious attempt at finding out what it might be. All I can say is: Some people eat too damned much meat, but whether they eat 13× or 7× too much is a difficult question.
(EDIT: Sorry about the obscenity. I think the "bacon in milkshakes" got to me.)
I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Right now we spend an inordinate amount of land on the relative monocultures of raising these animals, consuming vegetable matter is generally more efficient when it comes to land use.
So we'd have fewer chickens, but we'd have more land left to the wilderness. I don't really care about the interest of 100 chickens somewhere, but purely from a conservation point of view veganism is one of the worthwhile things we can be doing. Those animals are taking up land that we can replace with a more varied ecology.
But these species are never going to become extinct, we won't have 100% veganism, and some of them will still be raised even if they're not being eaten. E.g. chickens are very useful for pest control and to dispose of food waste.
> I'm not vegan, but that's absurd.
Sorry, I'm having trouble figuring out from your response what it is that you disagree with. The main point of my post is to address the question of whether it's ethical to raise and eat animals at all: whether, all things being equal, a world in which nobody eats cows or sheep or chickens is better than a world in which we eat cows and sheep and chickens, but give them decent living conditions.
Obviously other things are not equal, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.
How does that make any sense? In the real world we have resource constraints, so positing something like "there won't be any chickens" as a moral loss doesn't make sense, we'll have something else instead since the resources to raise chickens were freed up.
If you're throwing resource constraints out the window the question should be why we're not raising 1 billion blue whales for food in addition to of cows.
After all they're smarter, and if you're going to follow this logic that these animals ultimately benefit from their numbers being raised as a result of food production that should go for all of them. Having 1 billion city-sized aquariums isn't an issue if we're assuming we have infinite resources.
But we don't, in fact that's the entire reason we ended up with these particular species as food animals, they're the most efficient relatively speaking, not necessarily the tastiest.
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Can you cite that because my understanding is it takes less space to have live stock as you don’t need to do crop rotation. Organic is the worst as the yields are low you need to plant more to attempt to come close to the same yields as a GM crop.
Livestock always takes more land than an equivalent calorie-load of crops. It has to; you're feeding the crops to the animals instead of eating the crops yourself, so there's a lot of energy lost on building cows.
The actual farm footprint may be smaller, but the feed for those animals was still grown somewhere.
(Of course there are resources besides land. In desert environments, livestock still takes more land, but it takes several orders of magnitude less water, since ruminants can digest dry scrub while humans need well-watered grains. But in places that get plenty of rain, livestock is always less efficient.)
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Expecting the entire world to turn vegetarian, seems unrealistic, unless there is some major collapse of the entire ecosystem. The ideal solution is that meat goes back to being a luxury or treat, instead of consuming it daily multiple times. With a majority of our calories coming from vegetables. There is just far too much cheap meat available.
> If everyone in the world becomes vegan, what exactly do you think is going to happen to all of those domesticated cows, sheep, and chickens? Are people going to continue raising them as pets in the same quantities, out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not -- they would basically go extinct.
Maybe they’d be put in zoos?
> Maybe they’d be put in zoos?
I googled "How many zoos in the world", and got an estimate of about 1500. If every single zoo had 10 chickens, that would make about 15,000 chickens in the entire world. I think going from however many millions of chickens there are worldwide down to 15k would count as "basically exctinct".
Far, far more than millions of chicken. According to this NY Times article 23 billion alive at any one time. [1] The most numerous bird species in the world.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/science/chicken-anthropoc...
People might also keep them as pets.